Interactive drama survival horror games like Until Dawn, Telltale's The Walking Dead, and the games under The Dark Pictures Anthology are some of the more popular ones in the genre for a good reason: the player's decisions matter for good or ill.
However, these games are not the ones that pioneered this kind of survival horror. Surprisingly, the genre went back to 2001, during the swan song of the Sega Dreamcast console.
During this time, there was a game that ticked all the boxes Until Dawn and TellTale's The Walking Dead did, but in the guise of a B movie video game.
Here is the story of Illbleed.
Illbleed History, Gameplay
IllBleed is an interactive survival horror game developed and published by Climax Graphics (now known as Crazy Games) in Japan for the Sega Dreamcast, per the Survival Horror Wiki and Bloody Disgusting.
The game is critically and financially unsuccessful, with Rely on Horror citing a Mobyscore of 65/100. Despite these facts, though, it eventually gained a cult following for the same reason Until Dawn and The Dark Pictures Anthology got theirs.
Getting damaged by an untagged attraction can raise the character's pulse, which could kill them with a heart attack if left unmoderated. Similarly, a character with too low a pulse as a result of injuries will die.
In some ways, this more realistic approach to the survival horror genre made the game better than its modern counterparts
The now-popular "butterfly effect" is also present in Illbleed, where if the player took a weapon from a room in one scene, the next scene down the road would not have the already taken weapon.
Additionally, while the game allows you to control one of the four Horror Movie Research Club members, the player's performance while controlling them will determine if they get to live or die at the game's ending.
While the game shares simialrities with more modern games, the best way to see them and their differences is by playing it yourself.
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